Poster #120 - Children Consider Both Race and Gender when Making Judgements About Others

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Past research implementing the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) has found evidence that people typically view White women as more warm than competent, and White men as more competent than warm (Fiske et al., 2002; Otterbacher et al., 2017). Studies of SCM are typically conducted with prototypical group members in mind (e.g., White men vs Black men; White men vs White women). However, this approach overlooks the complexity of intersectional identities (Purdie-Vaugh & Eibach, 2008) and obfuscates how some combinations of identities may result in increased discrimination (Sidanius et al., 2018). We investigated children’s (N=45, ages 5-10) judgements of warmth and competence with respect to individuals with intersecting identities using a SCM task developed from work by Roussos and Dunham (2014). The stimuli for this study included faces of Black, Asian, and White men and women from the Chicago Face Database. We used the CFD norming data to ensure faces were similar in terms of age, level of attractiveness, and racial and gender prototypicality. Children’s competence and warmth judgements were analyzed with separate repeated measures ANOVA with Target’s Race and Gender as within-subjects factors and children’s Age Group as a between-subjects factor. We found a significant interaction between the Target’s Race and Gender on children’s competence judgements, F(2, 36) = 3.87, p = .030. Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc analyses revealed that this effect primarily reflected relatively high ratings of Asian women (M = 2.88, SD = .173) relative to Asian men (M = 2.20, SD = .26, p=.009). There was also a significant interaction between Target’s Race and Gender on the warmth measure, F(2, 36) = 8.984, p < .001. The effect was driven by children’s judgments that Asian women (M = 2.06, SD = .11) were significantly warmer than Asian men (M = 1.46, SD = .14, p = .002), and White men (M = 2.28, SD =.13) were judged to be warmer than White Women (M = 1.82, SD = .16, p = .017). These results suggest that children are making different assessments of warmth and competence relative to adults tested in prior SCM studies. Contrary to prior studies, children rated White men as warmer than White women and there was not a significant difference in competence ratings between the two. Additionally, although data collection for this study is ongoing, children appear to be making judgments about individuals that vary based on their intersecting identities. The tendency for children to select Asian women as warmer than Asian men but White men as warmer than White women implies that children may consider race and gender in conjunction when making judgements about people. This suggests that studies focusing on only one dimension of identity, rather than considering how identities intersect, may be failing to fully investigate individuals’ attitudes. In the future, we plan to collect data with adults, and to vary experimenter race in addition to the race of to-be-judged individuals to further investigate the dynamics and development of children’s person judgements.

Authors

• Kriss-Ann Gayle, University of Louisville
  Presenting Author

• Nicholaus Noles, University of Louisville

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University